Focus and intonational phrase boundary in standard Chinese

Abstract

This paper reports results of an experiment investigating the relation of focus and prosodic boundary. We tested the hypothesis that focus in standard Chinese introduces an intonational phrase (IP) boundary before a focused constituent by examining the durational adjustment of syllables in different prosodic positions (i.e. IP initial versus IP medial) and focus conditions (i.e. focused versus unfocused). Results show that under both focus conditions, IP initial onset was significantly longer than IP medial onset but little difference was observed in rhyme duration. Focus, however, tended to induce lengthening more consistently in rhyme than in onset in both prosodic positions. Furthermore, the magnitudes of lengthening on onset and rhyme tended to be comparable in terms of their percentage of lengthening. This suggests that the effect of prosodic position on segment duration is localized and restricted to onset while the effect of focus is relatively more global and spans over the whole focused constituent. We also found that an IP initial unfocused syllable differed significantly from an IP medial focused syllable in both onset and rhyme duration. We thus conclude that there is no durational evidence that focus inserts an IP boundary to the left edge of a focused constituent in standard Chinese.